SnapNames acquired by Web.com

Web.com has acquired domain name dropcatcher SnapNames for an undisclosed sum, according to press releases from it and former owner KeyDrive, confirming reports from Friday.
Web.com said the deal will be “immaterial” to its 2014 financial results.
The Nasdaq-listed company already owns leading registrars Network Solutions and Register.com. It’s also a new gTLD applicant, one of many companies having applied for .web.
KeyDrive acquired SnapNames, along with the registrar Moniker, from Oversee.net in 2012.
Just last week KeyDrive announced that Moniker, which with SnapNames had been managed by Craig Snyder, was getting a new CEO in the form of Key-Systems exec Bonnie Wittenberg.

Pirate Bay a victim as Go Daddy suspends hundreds of new gTLD domains

New gTLDs may have only been in general availability for a few weeks, but there’s already evidence of substantial abuse.
Go Daddy has suspended at least 305 new gTLD domain names, putting them on its spam-and-abuse.com name servers, standard Go Daddy practice for domains suspected of abuse.
Over 250 of these were put on the naughty step in the last 24 hours.
The suspended names include, notably, thepiratebay.guru, which matches the name of controversial torrent site frequented by people who like downloading copyrighted material for free.
The Pirate Bay has been like crazy recently, as one ccTLD after another shuts down its latest attempt to find a reliable home.
The .guru domain is registered under Go Daddy’s Domains By Proxy privacy service, so it’s not clear if it actually belongs to The Pirate Bay or to an opportunistic third party.
Other suspended names include premium-looking names such as electric.guru, sexualhealth.guru, as well as obvious cybersquatted names such as verizon.guru (not registered to Verizon).
But the majority of the suspended names seem to belong to a single registrant in Washington state, all in .guru and largely “pigeon shit” names such as bestdrinksites.guru and bestfashionsites.guru.
While 305 seems like a large number (albeit only 0.2% of the current new gTLD names sold), it appears that so far a single individual is responsible for most of the “abuse” in new gTLDs.

Euro registrars miffed about ICANN privacy delays

Registrars based in the European Union are becoming increasingly disgruntled by what they see as ICANN dragging its feet over registrant privacy rules.
Some are even refusing to sign the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement until they receive formal assurances that ICANN won’t force them to break their local privacy laws.
The 2013 RAA, which is required if a registrar wants to sell new gTLD domains, requires registrars to keep hold of registrant data for two years after their registrations expire.
Several European authorities have said that this would be illegal under EU privacy directives, and ICANN has agreed to allow registrars in the EU to opt out of the relevant provisions.
Today, Luxembourgish registrar EuroDNS said it asked for a waiver of the data retention clauses on December 2, but has not heard back from ICANN over two months later.
The company had provided ICANN with the written legal opinion of Luxembourg’s Data Protection Agency
In a snippy letter (pdf) to ICANN, EuroDNS CEO Lutz Berneke wrote:

Although we understand that your legal department is solely composed of lawyers educated in US laws, a mere translation of the written guidance supporting our request should confirm our claim and allow ICANN to make its preliminary determination.

EuroDNS has actually signed the 2013 RAA, but says it will not abide by the provisions it has been told would be illegal locally.
Elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s Blacknight Solutions, said two weeks ago that it had requested its waiver September 17 and had not yet received a pass from ICANN.
“Why is it my problem that ICANN doesn’t understand EU law? Why should our business be impacted negatively due to ICANN’s inability to listen?” CEO Michele Neylon blogged. “[W]hile this entire farce plays out we are unable to offer new top level domains to our clients.”
But while Blacknight is still on the old 2009 RAA, other European registrars seem to have signed the 2013 version some time ago, and are already selling quite a lot of new gTLD domains.
Germany’s United-Domains, for example, appears to be the third-largest new gTLD registrar, if name server records are anything to go by, with the UK’s 123-Reg also in the top ten.
ICANN is currently operating a public comment period on the waiver request of OVH, a French registrar, which ICANN says it is “prepared to grant”.
That comment period is not scheduled to end until February 27, however, so it seems registrars agitated about foot-dragging have a while to wait yet before they get what they want.

Moniker gets a new CEO

KeyDrive has appointed Bonnie Wittenburg, Key-System USA executive vice president, as the new CEO of sister registrar Moniker.
She replaces Craig Snyder, who was CEO of Moniker and SnapNames and remains CEO of SnapNames. Wittenburg keeps her EVP roles at Key-Systems.
“Through her expanded role she will drive cooperation and develop a synergistic relationship between the KeyDrive members,” the company said in a statement.
The KeyDrive stable also includes Key-Systems, NameDrive and KS Registry.
Wittenberg is a 15-year veteran of the domain name industry, with previous stints at Network Solutions and Iron Mountain.

MarkMonitor infiltrated by Syrian hackers targeting Facebook

The corporate brand protection registrar MarkMonitor was reportedly hacked yesterday by the group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army, in an unsuccessful attempt to take out Facebook.
While MarkMonitor refused to confirm or deny the claims, the SEA, which has been conducting a campaign against high-profile western web sites for the last couple of years, tweeted several revealing screenshots.
One was a screen capture of a DomainTools Whois lookup for facebook.com, which does not appear to have been cached by DomainTools.

Happy Birthday Mark! http://t.co/yWBwvXPGRZ owned by #SEA http://t.co/gk8nGxATLt pic.twitter.com/eAeGp1TvBF

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) February 5, 2014

Another purported to be a cap of Facebook’s control panel at the registrar.

MarkMonitor Administration Panel. #SEA pic.twitter.com/7zDbUxHbYJ

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) February 6, 2014

The SEA tweeted more caps purporting to show it had access to domains belonging to Amazon and Yahoo!.
In response to an inquiry, MarkMonitor rather amusingly told DI “we do not comment on our clients — including neither confirming nor denying whether or not a company is a client.”
This despite the fact that the company publishes a searchable database of its clients on its web site.
The attackers were unable to take down Facebook itself because the company has rather wisely chosen to set its domain to use Verisign’s Registry Lock anti-hijacking service.
Registry Lock prevents domains’ DNS settings being changed automatically via registrar control panels. Instead, registrants need to provide a security pass phrase over the phone.

Directi joins Domain.com family in $100m deal

Endurance International, the holding company behind brands such as Domain.com and HostGator has closed the acquisition of top ten registrar Directi and some related companies.
The acquisition, which was announced last September is worth between $100 million and $110 million — $25.5 million in cash and the rest in shares and a promissory note.
The deal includes Directi properties BigRock (a registrar), ResellerClub (the reseller-focused registrar), LogicBoxes (the registrar management service) and webhosting.info.
It does not include Radix Registry, the company that applied for 31 new gTLDs, 28 of which applications are still active.
Directi CEO Bhavin Turakhia “has agreed to be closely involved in the integration of the two companies”, but it doesn’t sound like he’s taking on a permanent role at Endurance.
Endurance may not be a familiar brand in and of itself, but its businesses include Bluehost, HostGator, Domain.com, FatCow, iPage and Mojo Marketplace.

EU body tells ICANN that 2013 RAA really is illegal

A European Union data protection body has told ICANN for a second time — after being snubbed the first — that parts of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement are in conflict with EU law.
The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which is made up of the data protection commissioners in all 28 EU member states, reiterated its claim in a letter (pdf) sent earlier this month.
In the letter, the Working Party takes issue with the part of the RAA that requires registrars to keep hold of customers’ Whois data for two years after their registrations expire. It says:

The Working Party’s objection to the Data Retention Requirement in the 2013 RAA arises because the requirement is not compatible with Article 6(e) of the European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC which states that personal data must be:
“kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data were collected”
The 2013 RAA fails to specify a legitimate purpose which is compatible with the purpose for which the data was collected, for the retention of personal data of a period of two years after the life of a domain registration or six months from the relevant transaction respectively.

Under ICANN practice, any registrar may request an opt out of the RAA data retention clauses if they can present a legal opinion to the effect that to comply would be in violation of local laws.
The Working Party told ICANN the same thing in July last year, clearly under the impression that its statement would create a blanket opinion covering all EU-based registrars.
But a week later ICANN VP Cyrus Namazi told ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee that the Working Party was “not a legal authority” as far as ICANN is concerned.
The Working Party is clearly a bit miffed at the snub, telling ICANN this month:

The Working Party regrets that ICANN does not acknowledge our correspondence as written guidance to support the Waiver application of a Registrar operating in Europe.
…
the Working Party would request that ICANN accepts the Working Party’s position as appropriate written guidance which can accompany a Registrar’s Data Retention Waiver Request.

It points out that the data protection commissioners of all 28 member states have confirmed that the letter “reflects the legal position in their member state”.
ICANN has so far processed one waiver request, made by the French registrar OVH, as we reported earlier this week.
Weirdly, the written legal opinion used to support the OVH request is a three-page missive by Blandine Poidevin of the French law firm Jurisexpert, which cites the original Working Party letter heavily.
It also cites letters from CNIL, the French data protection authority, which seem to merely confirm the opinion of the Working Party (of which it is of course a member).
EU registrars seem to be in a position here where in order to have the Working Party’s letter taken seriously by ICANN, they have to pay a high street lawyer to endorse it.

First European registrar to get Whois data opt-out

ICANN plans to give a French registrar the ability to opt out of parts of the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement due to data privacy concerns.
OVH, the 14th-largest registrar of gTLD domains, asked ICANN to waive parts of the RAA that would require it to keep hold of registrant Whois data for two years after it stops having a relationship with the customer.
The company asked for the requirement to be reduced to one year, based on a French law and a European Union Directive.
ICANN told registrars last April that they would be able to opt-out of these rules if they provided a written opinion from a local jurist opining that to comply would be illegal.
OVH has provided such an opinion and now ICANN, having decided on a preliminary basis to grant the request, is asking for comments before making a final decision.
If granted, it would apply to “would apply to similar waivers requested by other registrars located in the same jurisdiction”, ICANN said.
It’s not clear if that means France or the whole EU — my guess is France, given that EU Directives can be implemented in different ways in different member states.
Throughout the 2013 RAA negotiation process, data privacy was a recurring concern for EU registrars. It’s not just a French issue.
ICANN has more details, including OVH’s request and links for commenting, here.

Go Daddy turns to man boobs for 2014 Super Bowl ad

For some reason people like watching Go Daddy’s Super Bowl commercials.
Here’s its 2014 commercial, which the company posted to YouTube today.
Rather than attempting to grab the viewer’s attention with fleeting glimpses of female décolletage, which has become the tradition over the 10 years Go Daddy has been running these expensive annual ads, this time around it’s the male form that’s being exploited.
Man boobs, in other words. Dozens and dozens of pairs of man boobs.
Danica Patrick’s in there somewhere too, but she appears to have been CGI’d to look like one of the fellers.

You’ll notice the lack of any TLDs — new or old — getting a mention, not even in Go Daddy’s logo, which dropped the “.com” about a year ago.
You may also scratch your head at the denouement. Why were a bunch of black guys among those racing to the tanning salon? Baffling.

NameCheap: a top ten registrar?

eNom reseller NameCheap is actually in the top 10 largest registrars in terms of domains under management, judging by data in regulatory documents filed by eNom parent Rightside.
According to a Rightside SEC filing related to its spin-off from Demand Media, NameCheap accounted for 23% of the company’s total domains under management as of September 30.
With the same document declaring Rightside has over 12 million names under management as of the same date, NameCheap apparently looks after just under 2.8 million domains.
By my reckoning, this means NameCheap is very probably the ninth-largest registrar by DUM out there, sandwiched between GMO Internet and FastDomain.
My comparison is not completely apples-to-apples — NameCheap’s number may include ccTLD registrations and I’m levering the company into a gTLDs-only league table — so may not be fully reliable.
But it’s the first solid indication of the size of NameCheap’s business I’ve seen in a while.
While NameCheap is accredited by ICANN in its own right, it has never registered more than a handful of domains under its own name, leaving it in the sub-900 range in the DUM league table.
According to Rightside, NameCheap is under contract to exclusively use eNom’s wholesale services until December 2014, but the deal does have one-year renewals built in.